


we're all an indigo hue

by monsterbate



Category: MASH (TV)
Genre: Also Kissing, Angst and Feels, Arguing, BJ gets stubborn, Hawkeye gets drunk, Infidelity, Love Confessions, M/M, Margaret knocks heads, this is a story about knowing thyself
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-19
Updated: 2020-12-19
Packaged: 2021-03-10 18:33:44
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,310
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28101726
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/monsterbate/pseuds/monsterbate
Summary: “You don’t have to smile at me,” Hawkeye says after a fourteen hour shift capped off with a letter from Peg about Gus-the-banker who fixed her overdraft fees last week. Hawk’s antsy and angry and as tense as a twice-haired cat. Charles is out who-knows-where. “I know the truth, Hunnicutt, and your golden boy act is bombing in the here and now. Metaphorically.”(BJ and Hawkeye argue about volcanoes, Korea, and feelings—in that order.)
Relationships: B. J. Hunnicutt/Benjamin Franklin "Hawkeye" Pierce
Comments: 30
Kudos: 107





	we're all an indigo hue

**Author's Note:**

> Title and Hawkeye's drunken lyrics are from _It's a Blue World_ by George Forrest and Robert Wright, performed by [many, many talented artists over the years](https://secondhandsongs.com/work/146955/versions#nav-entity) including the incomparable Ella Fitzgerald and that Frank Sinatra fellow.

“You don’t have to smile at me,” Hawkeye says after a fourteen hour shift capped off with a letter from Peg about Gus-the-banker who fixed her overdraft fees last week. Hawk’s antsy and angry and as tense as a twice-haired cat. Charles is out who-knows-where. “I know the truth, Hunnicutt, and your golden boy act is bombing in the here and now. Metaphorically.”

“I don’t know what you mean,” BJ says with a laughing shrug. He flips another card at the bucket in the center of the tent.

Hawkeye glances at him over the rim of his glass, eyes icy. “You ever hear that old story, how’s it go? Oh yeah: live with a man for 40 years—eat with him, speak with him, sleep beside him—and you’d think you know him. But take a man to a volcano and hold him over the edge; then and only then will you meet the real man.”

BJ tries to laugh again; it comes out strangled. “What’re you trying to say, Hawk?”

“I’m saying Korea’s your volcano."

"So?"

"So I know you. I know the real you. The you Korea made. And Peg doesn’t, or can't; she and Erin didn’t have a volcano back in perfect little Mill Valley, did they? So they sent you off and now—”

“Don’t you _dare_ —” BJ says, and is surprised at the fury in his voice, in the raw righteous anger trembling behind every word. 

Hawkeye nods, petulant and pleased. “And right on schedule: here he is, folks, all the way from sunny—”

“Shut _up_ ,” BJ snaps. He pushes to his feet and looms over Hawkeye who doesn’t so much as flinch as he stares him down. “Don’t say another word. I’m warning you.” 

There’s a look on Hawkeye’s face that is—it’s wary and watchful and there’s an instant where BJ knows—he _knows_ —that Hawkeye has gotten exactly what he wanted the entire goddamned time, and BJ’s anger flares up again, blinds him. 

“I’m going out. Don’t wait up,” he snaps, and slams out the door. 

::

Here’s the thing: he’s not—

BJ Hunnicutt is a nice person. He’s a good man. He’s easygoing; he’s kind; he’s caring and thoughtful. Peg says she’s the luckiest wife in the world and Erin the luckiest daughter. 

He’s a _doctor_ , for chrissake. He _helps_. 

It’s easy, it’s so _easy_ , to smile and to make everyone else smile. To say the right thing, to act the part. To be the gallant, kind-hearted doctor who pulls a good prank, who makes a good pun. To be the dashing husband, the gentle lover, the doting father. To laugh, to always laugh.

It’s so simple. Maybe it’s too simple. Who the hell knows?

So when Benjamin Franklin Pierce dissects him with the cold precision of a surgeon, it’s so close and quick BJ can do nothing but anesthetize the wound with gin and wait for it to heal over. 

Because maybe underneath all that All-American golden boy act is a man who is—

That doesn’t give Hawkeye the right to say shit like that to him. Even if it is true.

:: 

They don’t speak; they don’t make up. If Hawkeye wants to go around talking about the real man, he can deal with the real man. 

The Swamp is a battleground of shifting territories: BJ goes early to the showers while Hawkeye stumbles in after midnight. The still and the rescued dental chair are Hawkeye’s; the campstove is BJ’s. Charles makes condescending comments about the lack of ruckus and is inexorably ignored. 

One morning, BJ finds a ball of unwashed socks tossed under his cot; he remembers lending them to Hawkeye two weeks ago for the sock hop the nurses were throwing in the Officers’ Club. In retaliation, he digs out the copy of Frost Hawkeye had lent him and tosses it on his pillow. He leaves his bookmark right smack in the middle, just because.

It’s strategic, is what BJ tells himself. A strategic retreat, to protect valuable assets. 

Hawkeye, were they speaking, would snort at that particular line and say something flippant like _What’s left to protect?_

::

On BJ’s first day in Korea, he met—he met Hawkeye. 

He’d left everything behind in the States; promised himself he’d find his way back home; he’d swore to do his duty; and then—

There had been Hawkeye, standing arms akimbo in the dust of Kimpo, cursing the blue sky like it owed him something. The crooked line of him in army fatigues, looking tired and hollow and so stubbornly vital that something in BJ had broken open at the sight of him. 

That had felt—BJ played by the rules and did what he was told and goddamn it if it wasn’t the most exhausting lie he’d ever told himself: that any of that really mattered in the end. 

Because there was Hawkeye Pierce, waiting for him in the midday sun.

:: 

There’s wounded, and it’s over the chest of a shivering 18-year-old that Hawkeye and BJ meet again. The kid’s got shrapnel in his lung and his liver and they’re piecing him together as fast as they can while Houlihan snaps instruments into their hands and the anesthesiologist shouts failing numbers at them. 

Their hands keep meeting, falling away, meeting over bloody organs and if this isn’t torture—

“I think your volcano thing is bullshit,” he says to Hawkeye as a distraction from their reality in the middle of clamping off a bleeder. When he glances up, Hawkeye’s bottle-bright gaze is waiting for him. There’s a smear of blood on his forehead. BJ wonders if it means something. If any of this means something. 

“Oh, do you now?” Hawkeye says in the same light tone, bending back over the mutilated remains of the boy’s guts. “Do, enlighten me.” He’s playing the part of a naive ingenue and BJ could strangle him happily; his hands are otherwise occupied. 

“It’s a botched premise,” BJ says instead. He can feel Margaret watching him; can sense Charles and the Colonel listening in; can feel the weight of the room, of the camp, of the war on his shoulders. “It’s flawed. If the only way to really know a person was to hang them over a volcano, there’d be a lot more holes in the ground.”

Hawkeye throws a sponge at the basin at his feet. “It’s a _metaphor_ , Beej. Or didn’t they cover that in medical school?”

“RIght after metacarpals, sure,” BJ returns. He reaches for the 3-0 silk and tries not to let on that this is what he’s been waiting for all week. “But that doesn’t change the fact that the metaphor is still bullshit.”

“Captain,” Margaret hisses. “Language, please.” It’s just as much a warning to keep their spat above board so Potter doesn’t end up separating them as it is about his swearing.

“So how do you get to know a person, I ask you? Do you wine and dine them? Sit at their feet for forty years? Ask them all the questions in _Reader’s Digest_?” There’s a thread of _something_ in Hawkeye’s voice that BJ doesn’t like, and the direction of the conversation seems to spin out over some widening crevasse. 

“I learn them,” BJ says lightly. “I watch them. Man isn’t a mystery, Hawk. Usually they come right out and tell you who and what they are—just not always to your face.”

Hawkeye looks up briefly at that, expression strangely closed off. “Oh, I know that. Probably better than most, humanity what it is.” He gestures at the plywood walls of the OR with his bloody gloves. “The problem is—the problem is the men who lie to themselves about who they really are and make the rest of us complicit. _Captain_.” 

BJ flinches at the wrath in Hawkeye’s voice, at the use of his rank, and at the very fact that they haven’t fixed anything at all but instead somehow made it worse. He finishes suturing his piece of the kid’s chest and straightens up, away from Hawkeye and his strange, roiling rage. There’s a new sense of wrongness in his chest, in realizing that maybe Hawkeye’s trying to tell him something and maybe he’s doing his best to ignore it. 

Margaret steps up and bumps him out of the way. “I’ll bandage, Doctor,” she says smoothly, obviously covering the awkward silence. “Medic! Bring in another patient for Captain Hunnicutt!”

BJ nods his thanks at her and moves away, falls back. Retreats.

::

“You know,” Margaret says when they’re washing up after surgery, fifteen or forty or five thousand hours later. “I’ve been thinking.”

BJ focuses on his nails, on scrubbing the beds raw so he won’t have to turn around to face her. “I don’t know how you’re _standing_ let alone _thinking_ after all that.”

“Ha ha,” she says, deadpan. “I don’t know why you and Hawkeye are fighting right now—and don’t bother trying to tell me you’re not—but keep it out of the OR.”

“Margaret,” BJ starts. “We would _never_ —”

“Can it,” she snaps. “You and Pierce are good doctors, but you’re both idiots. Maybe instead of arguing about how you get to know a person, you spend some time thinking about what you already know about each other. Then you’ll realize you’re _both_ being monumental fools.”

BJ keeps his attention on scrubbing his palms and says nothing.

“Look at it this way,” Margaret says, pausing at the door. “If you really thought his metaphor was ridiculous—you wouldn’t be so upset, now would you?” 

The door swings closed behind her and BJ is left staring at his hands, watching the red run down the drain.

::

He goes to the mess long after everyone else has eaten supper and dispersed and sits with a cup of ice-cold coffee and lets the stillness linger. 

Among the silence is the truth: He’s not the same man who left California a lifetime ago. He knows that. The bare bones of him that have been exposed for the first time in his life have taken root; who he is, what he is—has evolved. And he has discovered a vast well of anger and determination and fear that he had never had need to delve into before. 

He knows he’s changed. He knows it, and it scares him.

There’s a step at the door and Father Mulcahy eases into the mess, holding his own empty mug. He makes his way towards BJ once he’s refilled his coffee. 

“I don’t mean to pry, but is everything alright?” he asks in that gentle way of his, the one that dismantles excuses before they have a chance to be built. 

“Oh, no. I’m fine. Just—just needed some quiet.” 

The Father’s face twists and he bows his head for a moment. “You know, the thing about hearing confessional for years is that eventually you begin to tell when a man is lying,” he says finally, almost softly. “You don’t have to be fine, in this place, at this time.”

BJ pushes away his cup and sets his chin in his hand. “I know, Father. It’s not that.”

“Is this about what happened today in the OR?” Father Mulcahy says, voice careful. BJ wonders if any of them at the 4077 have seen the real Mulchay in all this time or if he, too, contains multitudes.

“I’m sure I don’t know what you mean, Father,” BJ says with false cheer. 

This is the moment that Hawkeye decides to make his grand entrance, stumbling through the mess tent door with a rolling stutter step that puts him nose-to-carafe. “ _Oh, it's a blue world from now on; oh, it's a through world for me_ ,” he warbles, bent over the coffee pot with the intense focus of someone who has been drinking intentionally for several hours. 

BJ makes himself very still, and waits.

When Hawkeye straightens, there’s a sway to his stance that has Father Mulcahy’s eyebrows lost under his hat. “Hello there, Hawkeye. I’d thought you’d gone to bed.” 

“Nope,” he answers, hefting his mug. “If I went to bed I’d have to sleep. Was there something unholy you needed me for?”

Father Mulcahy half-laughs. “Oh, no; I just needed another cup of coffee. Big day tomorrow, you know.”

Hawkeye lifts his free hand and considers his fingers for a moment. “Is—Wednesday?”

Mulcahy’s laugh is truer this time. “No, no. Tomorrow—well, today, actually,” he says, checking his watch, “today’s Sunday.”

“Ah. Comes every week, so I’ve heard,” Hawkeye answers. “May all your sermons be well starched.”

The chaplain tips his hat and makes his goodbyes, leaving Hawkeye to blink into his coffee mug as he ignores BJ, or BJ ignores him. 

“Come here often?” Hawkeye says finally, into the dark. “I think I’d remember a face that long.”

“Best service in all of Korea,” BJ manages through a throat that feels like sandpaper. 

“I’ve seen that on a brochure somewhere, I think.” Hawkeye makes a show of claiming a seat at the far end of BJ’s table, struggling to fold his knees under the tabletop without knocking over his coffee cup. It’s farcical with how long it takes before he’s got all his limbs successfully wrangled. “I might have to file a complaint with the head office. Either these benches are shrinking or they’re putting something with actual nutritional value in the food.”

BJ doesn’t laugh. He wants to, desperately, to relieve the strange space between them, but he seems to have lost the knack. He misses Hawkeye fiercely even though he is a handful of feet away. And he knows it means something, and he hates it. 

“Why are you here?” BJ asks when the missing is too much. “I thought you were going to Rosie’s.”

Hawkeye lifts his shoulders, hands flapping out dramatically. “Did. Went. Drank. I thought you were going to the Swamp.”

BJ studies the black pool in the bottom of his mug. “Did. Went. Couldn’t sleep.”

Hawkeye exhales loudly, an anxious sigh. “A symptom.”

“Of what?”

“Couldn’t say.”

“I thought you were a doctor,” BJ says, then stops. The pattern of their back-and-forth is familiar enough that BJ could do it while numb from the neck up, or drunk from the neck down, or hollow from the gut out.

“That’s what all the nurses say,” Hawkeye manages, and then falls into stillness. He jostles his mug back and forth across the table, the sound loud in the closeness of the midnight hours. “Beej? Are...are we going to be okay?” 

There’s a moment where everything—stops, and BJ can trace out the next steps neatly and clearly. He’ll accept Hawkeye’s apology and swallow down his frustration and rage and confusion. They’ll go back to gin and inside jokes and a closeness unnamed and unnameable. And—after, when he’s done and free and clear of Korea, BJ will return to California and never ever think about this place or these people again. And the man he became here—he’ll die, fall dead, decompose day by day, hour by hour in a house in Mill Valley. And he’ll be as close to happy as he knows how to be and he’ll choke down the certainty that it’s all a mistake, a lie, a performance he cannot escape. 

It would be so easy, so simple to lean into it and let it carry him away from— _this_. 

But if BJ has learned anything about himself over the past week, it is that he is no longer an easy-going man, a simple man, a man who lets and does not take. 

Instead, he opens his mouth and lets fly the truth. “I don’t know. I don’t know what to think anymore. It’s all—wrong.”

Hawkeye drops his forehead to the table, face turned away. “I’ve heard war does that to a person. Gets under your skin and makes you rot from the inside out.” 

“You shouldn’t have said what you did, about Peg and Erin,” BJ says finally. He feels angry all over again at it. “It was—you went too far.”

BJ can just make out a silent nod.

“But the thing I’m really mad about—” BJ lifts a hand to his mouth and notes distantly that it’s shaking. Whether it’s exhaustion or rage is unclear, but he presses his lips to his fist and tries to catch his breath. “What I’m really mad about is the fact that I—I don’t know if you’re wrong.”

Hawkeye turns his head on the table, haunted eyes finding BJ down the length of it. “Of course I’m wrong, Beej. I’m a first-rate idiot. They gave me bars for my bone-headedness the day I set foot in this cursed place.”

“Stop it; don’t. You don’t get to say—you don’t get to walk it back just because I’m angry, or because you’re chickenshit. I’m mad; so what? I get to be mad about it, and you get to shut up for once and listen.”

Hawkeye nods again, cheek against the grain. His eyes never leave BJ; this feels important.

“So I’m mad. I’m _pissed_. I don’t think I’ve ever been so mad in my whole life, you know that? I always let it go, shrug it off, but _you_ —you bring out the worst in me. You make me so _mad_ I could just—” 

BJ pauses, breathes out. He can feel Hawkeye’s gaze on him, feel the familiar weight of it, the strange thoroughness of it. He knows what it means. Of course he knows what it all means.

“You know what I think I’m maddest about? It’s that I think you’re _right_. I think—I think this place _has_ changed me or revealed me or exposed me or something, and that fucking terrifies me. How in the hell am I supposed to deal with that? I can’t just—I can’t go home. Not like this. Not with—not with all _this_ inside me. And goddamn you for it, Hawk, but _you’re the one who told me_. So I’m mad, and I’m mad at _you_ , and I don’t know—I don’t know—” Against his lips, he can taste salt on his skin. 

Hawkeye moves with intent, shifting down the bench so they’re face to face, wrapping a hand around BJ’s arm. 

“Beej, I’m wrong. I’m horribly, terribly wrong. After all this, you’re still going to be BJ Hunnicutt. You’re still going to be Peg’s husband, and Erin’s father, and homemaker of the year in Mill Valley, California. You can’t let the ravings of one mentally cracked bachelor mess that up for you.”

BJ turns his hand and catches Hawkeye’s wrist, presses until he can feel the catch of the scaphoid. He wants to shake him, or hit him, or _hurt him_ in some way that equals the howling loss let loose inside him. Because he knows Hawkeye Pierce and Hawkeye Pierce will lie through his teeth for him in this moment to try and make things better. And he doesn’t want any more lies. 

“You fucking _idiot_ ,” BJ says. “If you won’t listen to me—”

And he pulls Hawkeye across the table and kisses him. 

::

For a kiss, it’s _filthy_. 

To begin with, Hawkeye tastes like terrible coffee and cheap sake. And he kisses like he’s drowning, like he’s fighting for his very life, like he’s losing his goddamned mind to it. He’s all motion and want and madness.

BJ has one hand fisted in Hawk’s hair just to hold him still, the other tight around his wrist; he has to leash the urge to bite Hawk’s mouth, to mark it in some indelible way. 

And Hawkeye keeps fucking _whimpering_.

It’s a sound BJ’s not certain he’s ever heard before but it goes right goddamn through him and raises goosebumps down his spine. 

And then there is the way that it makes BJ _feel_ , all that rolling emotion falling away under the crystal clear certainty that kissing Hawkeye Pierce is an apex, a climax, a peak to have sought and claimed and won. Without having understood anything at all, he’s here and it’s all he’s ever wanted.

BJ’s half-sure he’s going to ravage Hawkeye in the mess tent regardless of who might be waiting or watching; he’s nearly convinced himself to finish pulling Hawk across the table so he can put himself between his thighs. He’s curious if Hawk is as hard as he is; if he’d writhe at the contact; if he’d sigh and moan; if he’d talk and talk and talk like he does at every moment of every other day. 

The thought of strings of incoherent rambling pouring out of Hawk’s mouth while BJ tries to distract him is enough to make him feel half-mad, have him kissing like a wild conqueror. 

But then Hawkeye wrenches himself away, panting, and looks up at BJ with bruised, wary eyes. 

“Beej, BJ—I don’t—we can’t—” His mouth is wet and red, distracting in the low light. 

“Hawk. Hawk: what is it?”

“We can’t—” He repeats, voice wretched. “You couldn’t. You won’t.”

BJ still has his hands on Hawkeye, one on his neck, the other close around his wrist. He could simply _pull_ and press his advantage; he knows Hawkeye wants this, too. There’s a part of BJ, a part that’s still raging mad, that wants to. 

But this is Hawkeye, and that matters.

So he lets go, steps back. Retreats. Lifts a shaking hand to his mouth, to kiss-bitten lips. “I do, and I could,” he says finally. “I will, Hawk. _We_ will.”

::

The rest of that evening goes like this: 

Hawkeye pushes away from the table and makes his way out of the tent in a carefully controlled walk that is absolutely not fleeing, and BJ stares at two forgotten coffee cups and lets himself acknowledge that he is in love with Hawkeye Pierce and doesn’t know what he is going to do about it. 

He knows what he _wants_ to do about it—he can picture it in exacting detail, in fact, overlaid with the memories of the last handful of minutes—but he knows, too, that this all means something. Something too broad and too large and too permanent for wandering hands and broken promises in the moonlight.

But how he gets from this moment to that is—less clear. 

Post-op is quiet, the light low. Lieutenant Able gives him a confused look when he pauses in the doorway that passes when he asks for pen and paper, says he doesn’t want to wake anyone in the Swamp. He pulls up a chair by the desk while she does her rounds and stares at _Dear Peg_ until the words smear across the page. 

_When I say Korea is changing me, it’s only half the truth_ , he writes. _The other half is maybe that man wasn’t really ever me to begin with_. He tears the page. _I’m so sorry_ , he tries again. _I’m not the man you married. I don’t think I can pretend anymore_. He lines it out. 

_Do you remember the promise we made the night we got engaged? How we would always be honest with one another, no matter what?_ His pen blots on the page, consumes his confession: _I’m in love. And the worst part is I think he loves me back._

He rips the pages out and pulls them to pieces before feeding them to one of the fires burning in a barrel outside the post-op doors. He watches them burn and doesn’t think about the look in Hawkeye’s eyes as he’d turned to leave.

By the time BJ makes his way to bed, the sun is just cresting the distant hills in the east and Hawkeye is silent and still in his cot and the world spins on. 

::

They do not talk about it. 

It is as if the night before never happened, as if their argument about volcanoes was a nightmare. Hawkeye wakes BJ the next morning by kicking the foot of his cot until BJ lifts his muzzy head. 

“You got a shift in ten,” Hawk says, already busy digging in his footlocker. “I offered to switch but apparently Margaret wants me especially on the evening rounds.” He makes a sarcastic ecstatic noise, like he’s absolutely thrilled at the idea of Margaret Houlihan trying to throw one over on him. “I bet she’s finally going to admit what it is I do to her.”

“She’ll strangle you with her bare hands,” BJ says, rolling over and throwing an arm over his eyes to stave off the light. HIs head is pounding like he’s hungover. “She probably just doesn’t want you on the same roster as Nurse Jennings.”

Hawk scoffs, still bent in double over his trunk. “It’s almost like Margaret thinks I’m a lech or something. How hurtful.”

“Aren’t you a lech, or something?” It takes a moment to untangle himself from his blankets and set his feet on the floor. He wants to ask, wants to bring it up, wants to name it for what it is, but Hawkeye is so frantically engrossed with sorting through his belongings that BJ knows it would be a mistake.

“Here it is!” Hawk crows, emerging with a magazine clutched in his hand. “And of course I’m a lech _and_ something. You’ve got five minutes.”

BJ opens his mouth to ask how Hawkeye knows that when he won’t even wear a watch, but he’s interrupted by Klinger banging through the door. “You’re due in post-op, Doc,” he says, hiking his thumb over his shoulder. “And the Major’s awful mad about something today so you don’t want to be late.”

“How thrilling,” Hawk says solemnly, a hand pinning his magazine to his chest. “I get a mention and everything.”

“I didn’t say anything,” Klinger objects, hands raised. A white handbag swings from his elbow. “Besides, just because she’s spitting nails doesn’t mean it’s your fault.”

“And what were her exact words?” Hawk asks, making a big show of flipping through his magazine. Somehow BJ can still feel the weight of his gaze from behind the pages as BJ gets dressed. 

“Something about needle-nosed doctors,” Klinger says. He adjusts his bag on his shoulder and turns his attention to BJ. “So you ready to face her?” 

“That’s my cue,” BJ says, swinging to his feet. 

Hawkeye feigns tearing his eyes off the pages in his hands, expression forcefully blase. “Good luck, godspeed, long live the king, yadda, yadda, etcetera, etcetera.” 

BJ doesn’t answer, following Klinger out the door. It’s when he’s just about to let it swing closed behind him that Hawk caves, shielding his uncertainty with the latest copy of _Nudist Weekly_. “See you for lunch?” he calls. 

“Of course,” BJ answers. He doesn’t let himself look back. “Can’t wait.”

::

Hawkeye is waiting for him when he finally makes it out of post-op, lounging against the doorjamb. He’s wearing his cowboy hat, pulled low over his eyebrows, and BJ’s heart absolutely does not do anything medically impossible at the ridiculous sight of him. 

“Howdy stranger,” BJ says, making sure he’s drawling like a Western hero. 

“Pardner,” Hawk returns. He turns towards the mess tent and starts a lazy promenade across the compound. “How was post-op? Everyone on the mend?”

“Jenkins—the kid with the belly wound?—his numbers are doing better. Harmon might have an infection; his temp’s up and his counts are high.” It’s easy to fall into step alongside Hawkeye; BJ shoves his hands in his pockets and kicks at a stray pebble. 

The urge to say something, anything, about last night sits heavy on his tongue. 

He’s got another half-drafted letter in his back pocket and a terrible urge to kiss Hawkeye on that crooked smile of his and nothing feels any easier than it did at the small hours of the morning. 

Instead, when he opens his mouth, what comes out is, “Klinger says we should have a quiet afternoon. Nothing coming our way for at least 24 hours.”

Hawk nods, and then stops walking. He’s got his hands tucked in his pockets, too, mirroring BJ’s slouched pose as they watch one another over the dirt and the dust. 

“Listen, Beej, about last night—” he pauses, swallows. His hat dips, and hides his eyes. “—I’m sorry.”

BJ rocks up on his toes and considers hauling Hawkeye close by the collar of his ratty t-shirt. “Sorry?” he repeats. 

“Yeah. I was—I was drunk, and I, ah, I maybe said some things, or did some things, and I—”

If not for the distant whine of the generators and the smell of gasoline and tarpaulin, BJ would think he’d fallen into some new nightmare, some lost hellscape. The bottom of his stomach has fallen out and is still going. 

“You were drunk,” BJ parrots. He wants to throw up. 

“Yeah, I mean, it’s not like what—it’s not your fault. You’re not a bad husband.”

“What are you—Hawkeye, what?”

Hawkeye stills, eyes jumping between BJ and the camp over his shoulder. The fact that they’re having this conversation in the middle of a goddamn Army mobile hospital unit is likely the most frustratingly ironic thing that has happened to BJ since he realized he was in love with his tentmate. The _fuck_. 

“You didn’t do anything last night to feel—guilty about,” Hawk hedges. 

“You—you—” BJ throws up his hands and tries not to shout. “I absolutely _did_ , you damn martyr! I kissed you—and I’d do it again if you’d actually _talk to me_ —and I’m figuring out how to tell my wife that I’m in love with you so _sure_ , I’m feeling guilty. So what?”

“You’re—” Hawk chokes. He literally chokes on his words, expression torn between cautious and devastated. He looks almost as beautiful as he had the instant after BJ had kissed him senseless last night, which is not helping matters in the slightest.

“Shit.” BJ hadn’t meant to say it like that, but it’s out there and there’s nothing to be done about it except endure. “Hawkeye.”

“Beej.” Hawk stops, rubs a hand over his face. “Don’t—you’re not. You love _Peg_ , not—” 

“Jesus Christ, Hawk. What do you think last night was about?” BJ snaps. There’s a new sort of panic rising in his throat, thick and bitter. He wonders if by trying to claim this, he’s lost it all—lost everything, lost himself. 

A stillness falls over them. BJ watches the way Hawkeye’s face twists, and digs his thumb into his thigh to keep his hands still. 

“I’m sorry,” he says finally. “I—I thought you knew.”

Hawkeye lifts a shoulder, a small motion kept close. His smile is pure slaughter, broken and grotesque. “What’s there to know, Beej?” 

BJ—stops. He can’t—he doesn’t know what to say. “Hawk—”

And BJ can do nothing but watch as Hawk shakes his head and tucks his chin, performs a shuddery little pirouette and walks away.

::

BJ proceeds to get as ridiculously drunk as he can stand. He starts with the still and drinks it dry; when it gets dark enough out to justify it, he crosses the street to Rosie’s and drinks until she throws him out. He considers going to the Officer’s Club but he doesn’t think he can handle anyone asking him where Hawkeye is, so he doesn’t and instead heads for Margaret’s tent. 

She doesn’t answer when he knocks, so he keeps knocking. Eventually she’ll come out and bash his head in for him, or give him what he wants so he goes away. Either would work at this point. 

“Captain?” A voice slides out of the darkness and BJ tries not to jump. “The Major’s in post-op, on duty. If you’re looking for her.” It’s Klinger on patrol, wearing a sequined gown and a gauzy scarf.

“You’re looking...shiny,” BJ comments. He has to hold on to Margaret’s doorjamb to keep himself upright. “Very shiny.”

Klinger shrugs, balancing his rifle. “A good offense is a strong defense. Number of times I nearly got run over by idiots driving Jeeps in the dark is too many times. So now I gotta wear this out just to make sure they see me coming.”

“It’s very nice,” BJ says. He nods very intentionally. “Very, very nice. And _shiny_.”

“So what’re you doing pounding at the Major’s door at this hour of the night?” 

BJ peers over Klinger’s shoulder, and then over his own, and then over Klinger’s other shoulder, just to be sure. “I need a drink,” he whispers. “And I happen to know the Major has some.”

Klinger whistles. “Well, she’s in post-op for another hour or so. I can go and get her, if you want—?”

“Oh, no, no, no,” BJ hurries to say. “I guess I’ll just—go to bed, probably. Yeah. I’ll—do that.” 

Klinger gives him a look that is clearly some variation of _You’re an officer so there’s no way I’m going to call you on this bullshit_ , and then turns and struts his way back towards the main offices. He doesn’t even bother to look back to check on BJ’s obvious lie.

The moment he’s out of sight, BJ gives Margaret’s door a hard shove and he slips into the darkness. He stands still until his bleary eyes adjust and he can find the lamp on the bedside table. Margaret’s got it draped in some filmy red material already, which keeps the light low and dim. 

It’s just enough for him to find the scotch, kept in the bottom of her wardrobe. As he pours himself a glass, he wonders if she’ll be very mad when she discovers him but then he remembers her admonishments from the evening before, and really she’s brought this upon herself, hasn’t she? _She_ told him to figure it out with Hawkeye.

So he drinks. He sits at Margaret’s table and contemplates the pictures she has tacked up over her bed and the precise neatness of her things and he absolutely does not think about Hawkeye or marriage or anything even remotely close to feelings. 

And he drinks. 

And drinks. 

And drinks.

When Margaret steps into her tent much, much later, she—doesn’t look surprised to find him there. Were he soberer(er), he might be able to assign some value to that development. It probably means something about Klinger, or perhaps even Hawkeye, but he’s _not_ thinking about Hawkeye, so there’s no value in wondering at her lack of surprise because it might make him think about Hawkeye. So.

“BJ Hunnicutt,” she says, all disapproving and firm. She’s got her arms crossed and her forehead furrowed. “What are you doing here?”

“Drinking,” he says cheerfully. “Would you like to join me?”

She begrudgingly accepts the glass he thrusts at her, holding it carefully as she watches him pour himself another finger(s). “Hunnicutt. Why are you here?”

“To drink,” he repeats. He toasts her, and throws back the scotch, and tries not to think of Hawkeye. 

“Does this have anything to do with what’s going on between you and Pierce?” 

BJ doesn’t choke. He is too drunk to choke. He is numb, and he isn’t thinking of Hawkeye, so it takes him a moment to figure out what to say. While he waits, he pours himself more scotch. There isn’t much scotch left, which seems like a bad thing, and a thing he can think about. 

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he says finally. 

Margaret snorts, or scoffs, or some noise, but she pulls out the other chair at her little table and sits across from BJ. She sets her glass down on the table, and the glass is still full. This feels like a good thing or a better thing than the thing about Hawkeye.

“You two need to get this figured out. This is—” She pauses, pulls the scotch bottle away from BJ. “This is ridiculous. _Talk_ to him, would you?”

BJ flattens his hands on the table. They are sticky, from gin and scotch and sake and beer, and he can feel the pull of muscles in his fingers as he presses down. “We did! We talked. And then we—didn’t. And then we talked again. And now we’re—” He shrugs, curls his fingers into fists, squeezes until his hands throb. “— _this_. I don’t know.”

Margaret sighs. “He spent the entire shift tonight talking around you, you know. There was a BJ Hunnicutt-sized elephant in the room and he made us all tiptoe around it. Now all I want to do is go to bed after a long shift and I come here to find you absolutely roaring drunk and refusing to acknowledge you’re being an idiot, and to be honest I’m sick of it! Figure it out, and most importantly leave _me—and my scotch_ —out of it!”

BJ freezes in his reach across the table for Margaret’s abandoned glass, and blinks up at her. “How?” he asks. 

“I don’t know! I’m not your keeper!”

“He’s my best friend,” BJ finds himself explaining. “But also he’s—he’s my—” 

“So go tell him that and get out of my tent,” Margaret hisses, clearly exasperated. She picks up her glass again, and BJ watches it flash in the light. 

“I did,” he says. “I told him I—” He gestures inarticulately. “He doesn’t—he didn’t—”

Margaret nods to herself, and then throws back her drink in a long, hard swallow. “Right, well, this _is_ Hawkeye Pierce we’re talking about. Has he ever reacted to a thing appropriately in his life?”

BJ opens his mouth automatically, prepared to defend Hawkeye’s honor, but realizes that Margaret’s gone and put the pin precisely in its place. “He probably didn’t even cry when he was born,” BJ says in lieu of anything else to say. 

Margaret pours herself another drink. “Exactly. So whatever you told him—” She takes a sip, mouth pursed. “—you’re going to have to tell him again. And again. And probably again.”

BJ nods. “And again,” he repeats. 

“Right. To get it through his thick skull.”

BJ keeps nodding. The problem is becoming clearer, he thinks, while his head is getting fuzzier. “Yes, right.”

Margaret pushes the scotch bottle back across the table. “I hope he gets it,” she says, voice soft. “What you’re trying to tell him. I do.” 

BJ doesn’t pick up the bottle. He doesn’t lift his glass. He wants to, but he thinks if he does he might forget what he needs to do. He sits in quiet companionship with Margaret, and lets himself hope. 

::

He wakes up hungover.

He wakes up in the supply room, propped against the wall with a bedpan in his lap and four tablets of aspirin in a twist of paper clutched in his hand. 

He wakes up scared. 

He wakes up, he stands up, he nearly throws up. His watch says it’s half past eight in the morning, and he knows he needs to eat something, and he’s got the afternoon shift to prepare for. 

On his way past, he swings through the mess tent to grab some toast and then keeps on straight for the Swamp. He needs to shower, he needs to change his clothes. He needs to—

“You’re alive,” Hawk says nonchalantly when BJ pushes through the door, a piece of toast between his teeth. “I was worried you’d gone and defected on us.”

“No, I—I walked.”

Hawkeye lets out a sour little laugh, and rings the glass belly of the still. “And drank.”

BJ grunts, and shoves another piece of toast in his mouth. “And drank.”

Hawkeye nods, and goes back to adjusting valves and tubing while BJ finishes his toast and takes his pills and waits for the nausea to pass. 

“You—you could have left a note, or something,” he says finally.

“I could’ve,” BJ agrees. He takes a breath. “But I figured you wouldn’t trust that, either.”

Hawk’s head snaps up, eyes narrowed. “What’s that supposed to mean?” 

“I told you something yesterday,” BJ says. His heart is racing; he feels sick and he’s not sure how much of it is from the hangover and how much of it is because it’s _Hawkeye_. “And you didn’t believe me.”

They study one another for a long, hard minute, until Hawkeye drops his attention back to his hands. He looks—tired. “Beej, you don’t really—”

“Damn it, Hawk,” BJ breathes. “I told you: I do. I do, and I will.”

“You love me.” His voice is low, quiet. There’s a question in the words, a tangible sense of disbelief. 

“Yes. I do.”

Outside their tent, BJ can hear wind. He can hear the distant sounds of people, of soldiers and citizens going about their lives. He can hear faint conversations, engines roaring, the sound of boots on gravel. If he listens hard enough, he may even be able to hear the far-off clamor of war. 

But all his attention remains fixed and focused on the man across from him, the man who cannot believe what BJ is telling him. 

“You know, when you first brought up that—that volcano thing,” BJ starts after a moment, after listening to Hawk breath. “I thought it was ridiculous.”

Hawkeye glances up with a twisted smile. “I know,” he says. 

“You said you knew the real man, the real me,” BJ continues. “You said—you said the problem is men who lie to themselves and make the rest of us complicit.” He studies his hand, laid palm up on his knee, and wonders at how strange it looks to him in this light. “So who’s complicit in this, Hawk?”

Hawk pushes to his feet and starts pacing around the tent with nervous energy. “Damn it, Beej. You can’t—you can’t _do_ this to me. I was just trying to point out that you didn’t have to smile through it all. I could tell that letter from Peg—the one about the banker—had you seeing red. But you just kept _smiling_. And it killed me, Beej. It killed something in me to see it.”

“You—you wanted me to be mad?” 

“Yes—no—I don’t know. I just wanted you to be _honest_. To—to stop pretending like everything was okay, when it wasn’t because you were here and Peg was there. You acted like it didn’t bother you, and I could tell it did. That’s all. I never meant for you—I never meant—you weren’t supposed to say—”

“I’m being honest now,” BJ says into the pause, into the waiting. “And I want—Hawk, I want you.” 

“Beej—” 

BJ doesn’t move, just watches Hawkeye’s frantic path around the Swamp. He wants to hold out a hand, catch his arm, pull him close, but he feels like any sort of movement might be enough to shatter this confessional they have found themselves in. 

“I’m sorry. Do you want me to stop saying it?” 

Hawk makes a strangled sort of sound. “No! I mean—Damn it, Beej: _no_. If you mean it—if you really, then… You know, don’t you? That I—how I—?”

“You love me,” BJ says in a low, quiet voice. 

“I do. Of course I do! I’m mad about you, or just mad, or—or something.” Hawk’s laugh is wet, self-conscious. “But you know that already.”

By some miracle, BJ keeps his seat. His hands are shaking again; this time, the reason doesn’t bother him. The world is bright and even if Korea has changed him, it has given him _this_.

“Hawk—” he says. There must be something in his voice because Hawkeye stops his pacing, turns to face him. He studies Hawk’s worn face, the dark circles, the tangled fall of hair, and he feels a surge of love and longing so deep he could drown in it. “—say it again, Hawk.”


End file.
